Friendly reminder that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is still essentially one billion dollars. Billionaires shouldn’t exist
Remember nobody can possible EARN a billion dollars. Nobody is that important or effective. If someone made a billion dollars, it was by taking away from the people below, the ones who actually did the work. Billionaires are thieves and leeches.
We have roughly 8 billion people on earth. If a person’s inventions and solutions combined improved the life of every person by a value of 13 cents, then they would have EARNED a billion dollars (because they would have created thta value).
Imagine I made a product that saves the life of 1,000,000 people (from an otherwise deadly desease). Is that not worth 1B dollars?
This is where the disconnect between “left” liberals and socialists come in. Left liberals will often say “nobody should have a billion dollars”, or even “nobody can legitimately accumulate a billion dollars”, and even in your example that’s probably true (no single person can manufacture, distribute, and administer a billion vaccines), but to steelman your argument, a better version would be a solo streamer who has a billion viewers, each donating $2 (half of it going to the streaming platform). That would be a legitimate accumulation of a billion dollars. Whether or not some of that should be taxed is an orthogonal discussion to the whether or not the accumulation was legitimate.
What we actually need to separate is legitimate and illegitimate accumulation of wealth. Socialists do this correctly. We recognize stealing the surplus generated by value of workers through private property rights (either of IP, or industry like factories) is a form of theft, and this happens to be how every current billionaire got their wealth, most millionaires, and even some people with net worths under a million got all their net worth.
It’s wrong to steal the surplus value of labor of your workers, even if it just amounts to 100k a year, while solo streaming to 10k viewers and making 100k a year is not wrong.
Those are very good points and I would agree with everything except for the statement that capitalists are stealing “surplus” value from workers.
Because workers are not (and should not be) paid for the value that the finished product adds to the market if they do not take the risk for it. Otherwise you would have to accept that if the product a worker was told to produce doesn’t sell, he shouldn’t be paid for it (since he produced nothing of value).
Picture this: Imagine I could buy a whole loaf of bread for 5$. I could slice it up into 20 pieces and sell each slice for 1$. If I did that, the 15$ total revenue would be rightly mine, correct? Now if we assume that the work of cutting it up and selling it was next to zero, i basically wouldn’t have worked at all and still made 15$, so you’re saying the 15$ would have to be stolen surplus value. But stolen from who? The baker who made the original loaf? But his laofs are just 5$ in value…
Now, if I had to work hours to sell the individual slices, we can agree that I have added value by working and thus I earned the money. But if I didnt have to invest any time (eg. if I could automate the process), should I still be entitled to that money? In my opinion, YES. What do you think?
Risk isn’t value. Risk isn’t something to incentivize in and of itself. The only reason we want to push capitalists to risk their capital is to circulate money in the economy. It’s not that we have society setup to reward risk takers (as capitalists will often frame it), it’s rather that in isolation, people would hoard all the money they make if there’s no way to use that money to generate more money, so to “effectively” (in the short term) circulate money back into the economy from rich people, the act of recirculating must have a monetary value. Of course in the long term this leads to run away wealth accumulation and massive inequality, as we’re seeing in the real world.
Risk in itself is actually bad. We want to reduce the total amount of risk in society.
If you buy a loaf of bread for $5 and turn it into $20 of value with zero effort, other participants in the market would do the same thing. Some would sell it for $10 (50¢ a slice), and people would continually undercut each other until the difference in price is roughly equivalent to the time-value of the labor spent. This entire process would be feasible in a market socialist setting, you didn’t introduce any capitalistic elements here.
As for automation, did you create the automation? If not, then you don’t deserve the full fruits of the automation. Even the person who “invented” that version of automation was doing so on the backs of other people’s ideas. Nobody has these ideas out in the wild without influence from society. To assert that some inventor of a product or even more specifically some user of a product deserves the full fruits that product yields is ignoring the fundamental reason the product exists in the first place, human cooperation. Capitalism ignores this.
I disagree: Having something for sure is better than having something with a risk. You also mention that risk is bad. Thus, taking on risk should be compensated for by a higher value.
If you buy a loaf of bread for $5 and turn it into $20 of value with zero effort, other participants in the market would do the same thing.
They still would need the 20$ upfront to be able to buy it in the first place. If I provided the money necessary to buy the bread and another person provided their time necessary to cut it, shouldn’t we both get rewarded?
I think of work itself like a product: I can offer my “workforce” on the market and someone can buy that workforce. If an employer uses my workforce suboptimally so that I dont generate much value, I dont care, they still owe me the amount that my workforce was worth. And if they combine the workforce’s of multiple people and generate more value, I dont think they should owe me more because the value of my workforce has not inherently changed. They just put it to better use.
About the automation thing: If I buy any product (in this case: automatic machine) and both me and the seller agree on a price and exchange the goods, then I concider any future claims on the fruits of that product as unethical and illegitimate. The surplus value that I potentially generate would not be stolen, it would, in my opinion, be explicitely given to me as part of the transaction.
We agree risk is bad, and that it’s the opposite of value. The end of your first paragraph is a non-sequitur though. We shouldn’t compensate things just because they’re risky. Jumping out of a plane and pulling your parachute at the last possible moment is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that. Doing drugs is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that. Driving 140mph is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that.
Like I said before, we don’t compensate wealthy individuals for “taking risks”. Taking risk has no value. It’s about money circulation. Without incentives to circulate money, they wouldn’t do it of their own accord. Of course, we could just circulate money through other means so we don’t run into problems like runaway wealth accumulation.
They still would need the $20 upfront
You mean the $5, right? Nobody was paying $20. Someone was buying a loaf of bread for $5 and selling slices for $1 in your example. At no point did anyone spend $20 in one go.
I think of work itself like a product
Are you making a descriptive claim or a normative one? Work is commodified, that’s a fact of a capitalist society. Are you saying it should be commodified or that it is? You have to do a much more in depth material analysis to arrive at the conclusion that it should be commodified. The act of renting out people and extracting their surplus value alienates people from their labor and continually contributes to further exploitation and inequality. This is how we end up with decades of wage stagnation as the richest people in the world multiply their wealth over and over and over again.
You can construct a society that doesn’t allow people to be bought or rented. That doesn’t view people as property or their labor power as a commodity. We have half of this figured out (you aren’t allowed to buy people), and most abolitionists of the 19th century also wanted to abolish wage slavery along with chattel slavery, but dismantling capitalism didn’t have support from the north like dismantling chattel slavery did.
then I consider (…)
Again, you seem to just be making descriptive claims about how society is currently structured, and then using that to imply normative truths simply on the basis that this is how it is right now. When human labor can be entirely automated in a capitalist society, what we will end up with is the 2 classes of people (bourgoise and proletariat) fundamentally changing.
Right now the bourgoise rents out the proletariat’s labor power, extracts the surplus value and uses property rights to continue this cycle of exploitation. The proletariat still have all the power if organized, and this is why organization (e.g via unions) was originally in capitalist thought a form of terrorism, because it goes against the very nature of what capitalism is about, serving capital.
With a fully autonomous society this changes. The bourgoise ends up being the class with all the power, no matter how organized the proletariat is. The proletariat is no longer the working class, instead they are the destitute class, the class that still only owns their own labor power and nothing else. They becomes worthless in an autonomous capitalist society.
At the very least it should be clear that a fully autonomous capitalist society would entail a utopia for the bourgoise and a dystopia for the proletariat (99% of the population). And the goal of capitalism is to continually get as close to this as possible. We can do better.
Are you making a descriptive claim or a normative one? Work is commodified, that’s a fact of a capitalist society. Are you saying it should be commodified or that it is?
I am saying that I think that you should be able to sell the results of your work or, if you so please, your work itself. Im not saying that it should be commodified automatically but rather that you should have the option to do so (eg. by applying to work for someone else). I have no issue with people selling their workforce on the market because they choose to do so.
Again, you seem to just be making descriptive claims about how society is currently structured, and then using that to imply normative truths simply on the basis that this is how it is right now.
Not this time. I basically say that the following should be the case because it’s the most fair:
If any goods are traded (with full consent and on truthful terms), both parties should have to completely waive their claims on that product and any future claims should not be allowed
Regretting an exchange of goods after the fact should not give anyone the right to anything
You can’t sell me a machine and then claim it’s “theft/exploitation” if I make a ton of money with it later down the line because “possibly making a ton of money with it in the future” was part of the agreement of you selling it to me. You knew the possibility existed and if you didn’t want that, you should not have sold it to me.
You wouldn’t have made a product that saves a million lives. Teams of doctors and scientists, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies they work for, are the plurality of people required to release and market a life saving medicine. If one person did everything, the R&D, the experimentation, the trials, the marketing, the backend business of running a pharmaceutical company, etc, then sure, have your billion dollars.
If we were a team of 1000 people and each saved life was worth 1 million, then we would still have earned enough money to make everyone of the 1000 team members a billionaire…
It represents the money in their pockets to literally anyone and anything that matters. They can secure multimillion dollar homes with that “fake” money. They can finance yachts, fancy cars, more houses, etc. Whatever the fuck rich people waste their money on.
So for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference does it?
Yes, but the ultra wealthy rarely are subject to taxes. They have no income. Their wealth is tied up in stocks, and they rarely sell the stocks therefore nearly never opening themselves to capital gains taxes.
They then borrow against the stocks for spending money. When they want more money, the refinance and get a bigger loan. The loan is only paid off by their estate after they die. The bank is happy to accommodate, because they’re willing to play the long game.
If you tax loans as income, you’d be screwing over the middle class who need mortgages to get ahead.
You could tax loans as income with some limitations. Things like whether the collateral is primary residence vs other property versus stock. Based on amount of loan or assessed value of collateral.
Perhaps with some tax credit on repayment to model the potential for “real” taxed income being used to repay a debt.
There are ways to maybe wrangle borrowing as income just like we wrangle income in interesting ways.
Friendly reminder that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is still essentially one billion dollars. Billionaires shouldn’t exist
Remember nobody can possible EARN a billion dollars. Nobody is that important or effective. If someone made a billion dollars, it was by taking away from the people below, the ones who actually did the work. Billionaires are thieves and leeches.
We have roughly 8 billion people on earth. If a person’s inventions and solutions combined improved the life of every person by a value of 13 cents, then they would have EARNED a billion dollars (because they would have created thta value).
Imagine I made a product that saves the life of 1,000,000 people (from an otherwise deadly desease). Is that not worth 1B dollars?
This is where the disconnect between “left” liberals and socialists come in. Left liberals will often say “nobody should have a billion dollars”, or even “nobody can legitimately accumulate a billion dollars”, and even in your example that’s probably true (no single person can manufacture, distribute, and administer a billion vaccines), but to steelman your argument, a better version would be a solo streamer who has a billion viewers, each donating $2 (half of it going to the streaming platform). That would be a legitimate accumulation of a billion dollars. Whether or not some of that should be taxed is an orthogonal discussion to the whether or not the accumulation was legitimate.
What we actually need to separate is legitimate and illegitimate accumulation of wealth. Socialists do this correctly. We recognize stealing the surplus generated by value of workers through private property rights (either of IP, or industry like factories) is a form of theft, and this happens to be how every current billionaire got their wealth, most millionaires, and even some people with net worths under a million got all their net worth.
It’s wrong to steal the surplus value of labor of your workers, even if it just amounts to 100k a year, while solo streaming to 10k viewers and making 100k a year is not wrong.
Those are very good points and I would agree with everything except for the statement that capitalists are stealing “surplus” value from workers.
Because workers are not (and should not be) paid for the value that the finished product adds to the market if they do not take the risk for it. Otherwise you would have to accept that if the product a worker was told to produce doesn’t sell, he shouldn’t be paid for it (since he produced nothing of value).
Picture this: Imagine I could buy a whole loaf of bread for 5$. I could slice it up into 20 pieces and sell each slice for 1$. If I did that, the 15$ total revenue would be rightly mine, correct? Now if we assume that the work of cutting it up and selling it was next to zero, i basically wouldn’t have worked at all and still made 15$, so you’re saying the 15$ would have to be stolen surplus value. But stolen from who? The baker who made the original loaf? But his laofs are just 5$ in value…
Now, if I had to work hours to sell the individual slices, we can agree that I have added value by working and thus I earned the money. But if I didnt have to invest any time (eg. if I could automate the process), should I still be entitled to that money? In my opinion, YES. What do you think?
Risk isn’t value. Risk isn’t something to incentivize in and of itself. The only reason we want to push capitalists to risk their capital is to circulate money in the economy. It’s not that we have society setup to reward risk takers (as capitalists will often frame it), it’s rather that in isolation, people would hoard all the money they make if there’s no way to use that money to generate more money, so to “effectively” (in the short term) circulate money back into the economy from rich people, the act of recirculating must have a monetary value. Of course in the long term this leads to run away wealth accumulation and massive inequality, as we’re seeing in the real world.
Risk in itself is actually bad. We want to reduce the total amount of risk in society.
If you buy a loaf of bread for $5 and turn it into $20 of value with zero effort, other participants in the market would do the same thing. Some would sell it for $10 (50¢ a slice), and people would continually undercut each other until the difference in price is roughly equivalent to the time-value of the labor spent. This entire process would be feasible in a market socialist setting, you didn’t introduce any capitalistic elements here.
As for automation, did you create the automation? If not, then you don’t deserve the full fruits of the automation. Even the person who “invented” that version of automation was doing so on the backs of other people’s ideas. Nobody has these ideas out in the wild without influence from society. To assert that some inventor of a product or even more specifically some user of a product deserves the full fruits that product yields is ignoring the fundamental reason the product exists in the first place, human cooperation. Capitalism ignores this.
I disagree: Having something for sure is better than having something with a risk. You also mention that risk is bad. Thus, taking on risk should be compensated for by a higher value.
They still would need the 20$ upfront to be able to buy it in the first place. If I provided the money necessary to buy the bread and another person provided their time necessary to cut it, shouldn’t we both get rewarded?
I think of work itself like a product: I can offer my “workforce” on the market and someone can buy that workforce. If an employer uses my workforce suboptimally so that I dont generate much value, I dont care, they still owe me the amount that my workforce was worth. And if they combine the workforce’s of multiple people and generate more value, I dont think they should owe me more because the value of my workforce has not inherently changed. They just put it to better use.
About the automation thing: If I buy any product (in this case: automatic machine) and both me and the seller agree on a price and exchange the goods, then I concider any future claims on the fruits of that product as unethical and illegitimate. The surplus value that I potentially generate would not be stolen, it would, in my opinion, be explicitely given to me as part of the transaction.
We agree risk is bad, and that it’s the opposite of value. The end of your first paragraph is a non-sequitur though. We shouldn’t compensate things just because they’re risky. Jumping out of a plane and pulling your parachute at the last possible moment is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that. Doing drugs is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that. Driving 140mph is risky, but we shouldn’t compensate that.
Like I said before, we don’t compensate wealthy individuals for “taking risks”. Taking risk has no value. It’s about money circulation. Without incentives to circulate money, they wouldn’t do it of their own accord. Of course, we could just circulate money through other means so we don’t run into problems like runaway wealth accumulation.
You mean the $5, right? Nobody was paying $20. Someone was buying a loaf of bread for $5 and selling slices for $1 in your example. At no point did anyone spend $20 in one go.
Are you making a descriptive claim or a normative one? Work is commodified, that’s a fact of a capitalist society. Are you saying it should be commodified or that it is? You have to do a much more in depth material analysis to arrive at the conclusion that it should be commodified. The act of renting out people and extracting their surplus value alienates people from their labor and continually contributes to further exploitation and inequality. This is how we end up with decades of wage stagnation as the richest people in the world multiply their wealth over and over and over again.
You can construct a society that doesn’t allow people to be bought or rented. That doesn’t view people as property or their labor power as a commodity. We have half of this figured out (you aren’t allowed to buy people), and most abolitionists of the 19th century also wanted to abolish wage slavery along with chattel slavery, but dismantling capitalism didn’t have support from the north like dismantling chattel slavery did.
Again, you seem to just be making descriptive claims about how society is currently structured, and then using that to imply normative truths simply on the basis that this is how it is right now. When human labor can be entirely automated in a capitalist society, what we will end up with is the 2 classes of people (bourgoise and proletariat) fundamentally changing.
Right now the bourgoise rents out the proletariat’s labor power, extracts the surplus value and uses property rights to continue this cycle of exploitation. The proletariat still have all the power if organized, and this is why organization (e.g via unions) was originally in capitalist thought a form of terrorism, because it goes against the very nature of what capitalism is about, serving capital.
With a fully autonomous society this changes. The bourgoise ends up being the class with all the power, no matter how organized the proletariat is. The proletariat is no longer the working class, instead they are the destitute class, the class that still only owns their own labor power and nothing else. They becomes worthless in an autonomous capitalist society.
At the very least it should be clear that a fully autonomous capitalist society would entail a utopia for the bourgoise and a dystopia for the proletariat (99% of the population). And the goal of capitalism is to continually get as close to this as possible. We can do better.
Yeah my bad, I meant the 5$.
I am saying that I think that you should be able to sell the results of your work or, if you so please, your work itself. Im not saying that it should be commodified automatically but rather that you should have the option to do so (eg. by applying to work for someone else). I have no issue with people selling their workforce on the market because they choose to do so.
Not this time. I basically say that the following should be the case because it’s the most fair:
You can’t sell me a machine and then claim it’s “theft/exploitation” if I make a ton of money with it later down the line because “possibly making a ton of money with it in the future” was part of the agreement of you selling it to me. You knew the possibility existed and if you didn’t want that, you should not have sold it to me.
You wouldn’t have made a product that saves a million lives. Teams of doctors and scientists, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies they work for, are the plurality of people required to release and market a life saving medicine. If one person did everything, the R&D, the experimentation, the trials, the marketing, the backend business of running a pharmaceutical company, etc, then sure, have your billion dollars.
If we were a team of 1000 people and each saved life was worth 1 million, then we would still have earned enough money to make everyone of the 1000 team members a billionaire…
No. It isn’t
Then a human life would be worth less than a million dollars…
One million seconds is ~12 days.
One billion seconds is ~32 years.
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But they can use that to secure cheap debt, and use those investments as effective capital.
The fact it isn’t technically money in a bank account doesn’t really matter, because it can be leveraged as if it were
It represents the money in their pockets to literally anyone and anything that matters. They can secure multimillion dollar homes with that “fake” money. They can finance yachts, fancy cars, more houses, etc. Whatever the fuck rich people waste their money on.
So for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference does it?
Capital gains tax exists. Whenever they liquidate any assets, they should be taxed heavily. That’s just a start.
Yes, but the ultra wealthy rarely are subject to taxes. They have no income. Their wealth is tied up in stocks, and they rarely sell the stocks therefore nearly never opening themselves to capital gains taxes.
They then borrow against the stocks for spending money. When they want more money, the refinance and get a bigger loan. The loan is only paid off by their estate after they die. The bank is happy to accommodate, because they’re willing to play the long game.
If you tax loans as income, you’d be screwing over the middle class who need mortgages to get ahead.
You could tax loans as income with some limitations. Things like whether the collateral is primary residence vs other property versus stock. Based on amount of loan or assessed value of collateral.
Perhaps with some tax credit on repayment to model the potential for “real” taxed income being used to repay a debt.
There are ways to maybe wrangle borrowing as income just like we wrangle income in interesting ways.
Ooh there definitely could be a way to track that.
The rich write the laws though.